So ran the thoughts of
Brother Gregory as he stood in that freezing workshop, the icy draughts
penetrating beneath his black monk’s habit and spiralling around his bare legs
concealed beneath. His hands were sodden with clay and his flimsy protective
tunic, hardened with spatters of clay, was streaked with uneven lines of colour
where he had tried to wipe the tile glaze off his hands, bringing a garish
brightness to the small, dimly lit outbuilding.

“My Lord”, Gregory
prayed, “I joined this Monastery three years ago - in 1425 - to serve you. I
knew things would not be easy. I was prepared to sacrifice a life of comfort, of
companionship, even of physical pleasure to devote myself instead wholeheartedly
to you. I try to remain focussed and to obey the Prior. Yet here I am, in the
middle of Bedfordshire, unable to speak - save for an hour each Sunday or when
reciting the seven services held in chapel each day - cold, clogged with clay
and attempting to produce something useless. My Lord, help me to understand
why”.

Then, feeling guilty for his negativity and afraid
lest he may have stirred up God’s wrath, Gregory made against his breast the
sign of the cross (thereby depositing more clay onto his tunic), took in a deep
breath and tried to carry on with his task in a spirit of more than mere
acquiescence.

Pulling the rough wooden
frame towards him, he began transferring the wet clay to its interior patchwork
of squares, smoothing it down and wiping the excess off the edges. Satisfied
with content and consistency, Gregory reached out for the wooden embossing tool.
He wondered just how many clay tiles had he embossed with this rosette and
fleur-de-lis pattern.
The
re was already a pile of them, glazed and fired by his hand, standing outside
the workshop, shivering like him in the cold and not going anywhere. Why was he
making more? If of no use to the monastery, who were they for?

Those negative thoughts
again. Could he never banish them? Why did he have to question everything? What
was there inside him trying to make itself felt? It wasn’t, creativity: he had
been assigned this work by the Prior to help keep his mind from wandering.
Unfortunately, the repetition - mixing, smoothing, stamping, bisque firing,
glazing, firing again, stacking - had afforded ample opportunity for his
thoughts to drift. He had managed to control some of his brain’s wildest
meanderings and he always managed to return to the here, the now - Beadlow
Priory near the village of Clophill, in the fifteenth century; a monastery
existing to honour God and to offer prayers for the living and dead. In his
heart, though, Gregory knew he wanted to do something
to make a real difference. Even if it was for just one person, he would feel
justified in the path he had chosen.
The
Prior had told him that his presence in the monastery meant something to God
and to all those people outside the walls who looked towards that place for
comfort and strength but, to Gregory, that was corporate responsibility. He
wanted to do something positive, directly for one individual, to help change one
person’s life for the better.

With these feelings of
frustration, Gregory heard the rhythmic chiming of the chapel bell warning of
the next service. Laying aside his tools he prepared to
marshall
his wayward thoughts and concentrate on the coming devotions. He stepped
outside into the icy wind and looked down at the neat stack of already completed
tiles.
The
n, before he became indistinguishable from the other habited and prayerful monks
now silently moving towards the chapel, an overmastering desire to express his
individuality suddenly propelled him to grab his fletching knife. Turning over
one of the finished tiles he roughly etched onto the back his initial and the
year: “G - 1428”. “I have stamped my individuality on something”, he
thought. “Underneath this habit I am still me”.

The bell ceased. Fighting against the bitter wind
Gregory just succeeded in making his place in the stalls as the Prior’s
opening words rang out “Deus in adjutorium meum intende”. “O God, come to my assistance”.

Gregory never returned to the
workshop. That night he started shivering violently. It was not the cold which
had eaten into him; it was something more serious, more deadly. His fellow
brethren gathered round him, enfolding him in thick blankets, lifting him bodily
to sit before the blazing, open log fire.
The
y tried to whisper injunctions to him, breaking their enforced silence.
The
y tried to help him drink a warming brew but Gregory’s fingers were unable to
grasp the cup and his lips remained closed, his teeth chattering wildly behind
them. His tongue was quite incapable of speech and his features gave out a fixed
stare, looking way beyond the cloister, his eyes blinking only infrequently.
Soon a more vacant look took over and the final thing Gregory saw on this earth
was the Prior, with outstretched hand, administering over him the last rites.

Gregory never lived to see a
use for his tiles. He never lived to see that day, 100 years later, when Henry
VIII swept away, with comparative ease, all the monasteries and convents from
this land, for them not to return for centuries. Gregory would never have
believed that Beadlow Priory would crumble and disappear so completely that even
its precise location was forgotten and that by the end of the millennium nothing
whatsoever remained to be seen above ground.

Gemma loved exploring the past.
As a young girl she was unusual in enjoying history lessons at school,
diligently learning dates and battles and lists of Monarchs. From an early age
she knew she was different to the other girls somehow and, reaching her teens,
she began to feel inside her something she couldn’t quite pin down. It seemed
to manifest itself as a need to try and achieve something which she could put to
really practical use in her forthcoming adult life.

Always a bit of a loner and,
like many such individuals, something of a bookworm, she was browsing one day in
the school library when she discovered a book about mediaeval monasteries. Quite
out of the blue, something tugged at her: was this the field in which she could
become a specialist? She decided there and then it was and her determination and
diligence drove her on to gain a Doctorate in Mediaeval History.

Well known in her field, Gemma
was often called in to advise on archaeological excavations and when, in 2005,
Bedfordshire County Council decided to investigate the site of a former
monastery called Beadlow, located somewhere near Clophill, Gemma’s specialist
knowledge proved invaluable.
The
excavations which she oversaw revealed the location of the monastery and the
layout of its buildings, including what may have been a workshop. In one of the
archaeological trenches which had been cut, Gemma one day came across fragments
of what initially looked like pottery. Carefully brushing off centuries of
compacted soil, she was able to discern sections of rosettes
and fleurs-de-lis. On that sunny warm June day she meticulously started to join
the fragments together on the ground and realised that these were pieces of
hand-made clay tiles, dating from the fifteenth century.

She knew without doubt that
these would have been made at the monastery and she wondered who had filled the
moulds and performed the embossing and glazing.
The
n she noticed a sharp corner protruding from the side of the trench. Carefully
scraping around this, she gradually unearthed a complete tile, which transpired
to be the only intact one extracted from the whole site. Somehow it had escaped
damage down the long years and, after cleaning, it looked as colourful as it did
on the day it was fired.

Gemma turned it over and
saw a scratched-on date – 1428 – and a letter G. She wondered about the monk
who had left his mark this way. She tried to visualise his sense of calling, his
vocation, his commitment to be part of a religious community, living a detached
and difficult life of prayer, service and obedience.

In that instant, everything
became clear. She knew. That was her
tile - G for Gemma - she was meant to
find it. That disembodied feeling inside her which had never really gone away,
that yearning to have a purpose, which had masqueraded as her professional
drive, was now blindingly obvious.

Nine months later, Gemma
stood before the front door of an impressive building outside the
village
of
Turvey
and rang the bell. A woman wearing a white nun’s habit and with head adorned
by a white wimple beamed to the postulant: “Welcome, Gemma. Welcome to the
Priory of Our Lady of Peace. May your future years here with us as a Sister be
long and fulfilled”. In Gemma’s suitcase was Gregory’s tile.